Creating hosts file entries allows you to create DNS aliases which can be very handy for web development. If your on a Mac, you will notice that it has the /etc/hosts file just like other unix os's.

One problem I kept running into however was that OS X was caching my host entries.

My brother Steve just pointed me to MacFuse which looks like it will be super handy!

You have been able to setup a remote SSH virtual local file system on linux for a while now. I have wanted to be able to do this on my Mac for a few years now.

Do you have access to a shell account on a unix server with some spare space? If so it's pretty easy to incrementally backup your files securely with SSH.

I mentioned previously that I was looking at voip phone services. I decided to go with Skype, and finally got around to getting a USB phone.

I whipped up this shell script for adding items to your backpack todo list. I've tested this on Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) but it should work on any mac, and most unix operating systems if your using a bash shell.

If you don't use Safari as an RSS Feed reader (I use bloglines), the feature can get kind of annoying. Every time you click on an RSS feed, it is redirected to a feed:// url.

Learning UNIX is a seemingly daunting task, there are thousands of commands out there, each with hundreds of options. But in reality you only need to know a few of them.

I use unix quite a bit, usually either on one of our Linux servers, or on my Powerbook with OS X.

You can make the close X show-up on a widget by holding down Command and Alt/Option. This is sometimes easier than hitting the + button.

I have had Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger for 3 days, and I have already released my first Dashboard Widget called Dash Shopper - Amazon Product Search Dashboard Widget.

The widget supports multiple locales US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Japan.

Apple has released Java 1.5 as a manual download with no plans to release J2SE 5.0 for earlier releases of Mac OS X. Which I guess means that its not going to show up in Software Update for quite some time. Additionally applications requiring J2SE 5.0 / JDK 1.5 must explicitly request version 1.5.

I just ordered my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger off of Amazon because they have a $35 mail in rebate if you order by May 1st.

I also grabbed a copy of iWork 05 for $74, and iLife 05 for $69.99 (saving another $16). You can get some good deals at Amazon on Apple software.